What you're really after is collision physics, which Bryce doesn't have.

Failing that, I think a judicious amount of the Solo tool will help cut down the 'noise' factor of arranging the cubes.

Start by layering the 'bowl' level cubes as you see fit. Put them on angles, go crazy, have fun, because no-one's going to see the bottom layer (other than the camera-facing cubes) so there's no point stressing about it.

Copy all those cubes and raise them both above, and to one side, of the originals. (Generally I do this with this sequence: Select Cubes, Group, Copy, Paste , Edit Attributes, add 10 to both the X and Z position coordinates, Ungroup. You may wish to select your floating cubes again at this point and copy paste a few times, to get more cubes.)

So now you have a pool of floating cubes you can drag into position. I offset them from both X and Z to allow me to use the preset orthographic views (`1234) for quick views without the floating cubes interfering with my central view. I also find that placing the Director in 'Center to Selection' view is the most useful view.

Select a floating cube. Also Select, say, 3-5 bowl cubes in close proximity. Click the Solo button.

All that should be visible now are the selected cubes. This should greatly cut down the wireframe noise when dealing with multiple objects. When you're done with the area you're working on, click the Solo button again, reselect a new area of bowl cubes and go again.

EDIT: Just by way of interest, Andrew Price of BlenderGuru.com created this short, entertaining tutorial on Blender's Rigid Body Physics settings that seem very appropriate for your needs, CT :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHVYYMG3QVY

Photo 1: And now you have your morph under your item. Move the slider back and forth and TEST your morph. If you don't like the pull, guess what? You still have your D-Former set up and can change the location of the base and tweak the field. Another great reason NOT to delete the D-former at the first opportunity.

Photo 2: Because I had yellow and orange dots from my Field on those rocks to our right, watch what happens when I move my morph slider. Fun! (This photo has 3 images together.) Look at how the rocks change- you can raise or flatten them. CLICK TO ENLARGE/CLICK AGAIN.

Photo 3: TIP: If you are morphing terrain, do spot renders or render a small area to see if the materials/surface need to be bumped or displaced. Because my morph stretched the terrain a bit (and I also scaled and pulled it) I upped the bump and displacement. Here's the settings.

Okay, done with D-forming. Now just some general workflow tips and transforming this area into a tourist or private outlook. Let's do Creating Groups and how that can save you time.

Photo 3: TIP: If you are loading a lot of flowers and vegetation into a large scene, load it up and don't bother to move it. Select them all in the Scene Tab (you can Control and click each one, or Shift and click the first and last one) then go to Create>Group. Now they are really easy to move to one central location, and you can disperse from there by simply clicking on the individual object. I did that with the flowers (they came in at the bottom of the cliff, I need them up at the overlook.)

Photo 4: So you can see the Group in the Scene tab and I moved it to the overlook by the waterfall. I also brought in the Beach Pod. Not worried about exact location or whether it's level, I'm just getting possibilities to the location.

Cris Palomino said:

Luci45 said:

Novica said:

Kiddo, you lost me, which isn't hard to do. Are you saying studio will recognize that you have Lee installed and all we do is use GM2? I like the looks of the heads you did. I think I like the third one, top row, the best.

Thanks. Yes, It is a strange way to do it, but that's the way it works. You would have to apply Lee's body and texture if you want to use them. I used several different textures on these. That is Malakai on the one you like. The ones with the thinner brows are Ryuu for M5.

Hi, Luci45,

I'm happy you liked my heads. Reversing out is actually regularly done on things. As long as you have the required figure, it works. If the base figure used wasn't reversed out, you'd be getting Lee without buying him. :) Interesting approach you took to change the heads. I did purposely change the heads to have different proportions in keeping with some of the nationalities I used as well as for a good amount of variation. Hope they continue to be useful and fun. :)

BTW, Cris is short for Cristina. ;)

Great thread!

Hi Chris. I do really love these. I'm sure I will continue to enjoy them and make some interesting characters from them with mixing morphs.

I hope you do more, like some females and Africans, Native Americans (North, South and Central.)

Kyoto Kid said:

...finally a break in the heat, officially hit 99° yesterday (100° and higher in central parts of the city). Today low 80s with a chance of thunder and then in the 70s for the next few days. Good time to install the new GPUs and run tests before the heat returns next week.

Kulay, maybe it isn't the mattress but your living situation that is affecting your sleep. I know when I am all wound up due to RL issues (like the unemployment extension debacle of the last several months) I sleep very fitfully. Maybe you really need to really impress on your caseworker that you need to be in a more constructive and positive environment than you currently are. A negative living environment can have very serious long term effects. After more than 50 years, I'm still wrestling with feelings of inadequacy that were only reinforced by the last job I as in. This is why it has been that much more difficult to find work (and why I am making a career change this late in life) as I don't wish to relive a similar experience again.

I know it is the disabled lady who is causing all the raucous in the house. (did I use the right word?) She is an invalid.

...finally a break in the heat, officially hit 99° yesterday (100° and higher in central parts of the city). Today low 80s with a chance of thunder and then in the 70s for the next few days. Good time to install the new GPUs and run tests before the heat returns next week.

Kulay, maybe it isn't the mattress but your living situation that is affecting your sleep. I know when I am all wound up due to RL issues (like the unemployment extension debacle of the last several months) I sleep very fitfully. Maybe you really need to really impress on your caseworker that you need to be in a more constructive and positive environment than you currently are. A negative living environment can have very serious long term effects. After more than 50 years, I'm still wrestling with feelings of inadequacy that were only reinforced by the last job I as in. This is why it has been that much more difficult to find work (and why I am making a career change this late in life) as I don't wish to relive a similar experience again.

Stuart,
Looks to me as if the shadow cast by the plane would not be visible to you from this perspective. If the sun had been higher up in the sky then indeed we would expect the shadow from the plane to fall directly beneath it. What I do think you are missing however is some degree of upward facing light. Most often we concern ourselves only with the light that shines down, we forget that light bounces back up into space from the ground. Maybe you could add a radial beneath the plane so that the shadow isn't so dark on the underside.

David B
Those galaxies look amazing. I'm really impressed to see these are made with procedurals. If you can find a means of flattening out the central sphere so that it blends into the spiral a bit more these will look fairly realistic!

Guss, Horo, David,
I cannot thank you guys enough for your detailed and honest feedback. You are all absolutely correct. There are several things going on that aren't immediately obvious. First I will explain what EGDLS is for Guss.

EGDLS stands for EarthGlow Dome Light Strategy. Just as I was describing to Stuart about the light that reflects back upward into space and how it should be illuminating the underside of the plane. Chohole's example shows clearly how incredibly bright the shaded area underneath the plane should be. In real life there is always a ton of light flying around in all different directions, not just downward. Most of the time we as Bryce artists don't think about the light that bounces upward, so I often see Bryce renders where there is some degree of light missing. After years of rendering images of objects with dark undersides it begins to look "natural" to our trained eyes but in fact it isn't. More light is almost always better than not enough. EGDLS is basically two light domes, one that works as a Skylight blue influence, and another that is a gold colored dome for the Earth Glow. Because Light domes can be directionally biased in Bryce, the Skylight dome is biased to shine more of its light downward and the EarthGlow dome is biased so that most of its light shines upward. Simply disable the shadow casting from the ground plane so that the EarthGlow light can penetrate and you now have a means to get light into the areas near the ground where skylight alone would have already been obstructed by taller objects. The problem isnt the EGDLS, as the tree trunks can demonstrate. But the leaves are a different issue.

What goes wrong with this scene is exactly what David described. Due to limitations, Ive had to make several compromises, one of them being the essential translucency. What you see here is my best attempt to employ ambience to do the job of translucency, of which it fails.

Below is a quick sample of what these same trees look like rendered with translucency. To answer Horo's previous question; ngPlant can use meshes or billboards for leaves, but I use only meshes for leaves because only meshes can produce translucency. Realize that this little render took 13.5 hours on my monster 8 core Xeon system, and there are only a few palms visible, it is nowhere near the complexity of a real scene. Granted the specular response is too high, but you can still see how powerful the translucency can be. The lighting levels are exactly the same in this render as in the previous one. This render was done with both domes set to the minimum of 16 lights each plus the default sunlight for a grand total of 37 point lights (which isnt very many at all). To get smooth shadows, I should be rendering with each dome quality no less than 256 totaling over 500 point lights all combined. Due to the low light quality setting, there is a ton of shadow banding visible in both the original render and this new one. The shadow banding on the woman's body indicates how few lights there really are.

Lessons learned:
I've learned that high polygon meshes generally render more slowly than low polygon meshes. A mesh that is over a million polygons will render significantly more slowly than a mesh only a few hundred polygons. I think it is due to the Self Shading. I suspect that when Bryce is calculating the way a mesh casts shadows onto itself the higher polygonal complexity means many more calculations. This is a sad irony for me.

Part of the trick for how I accomplish this degree of complexity is that I build highly detailed models and groups of plants up to a few million polygons and then instance that group of plants all over the place. In the case of the trees, by the time I get to using them they are no longer made of separate meshes for leaves and trunk, I have consolidated them into a single mesh object (this is necessary for the Instance Lab to properly rotate the model due to a rotational bug with Grouped objects in the IL). I don't instance groups, only meshes.

This current example took 14 hours to render and a big part of it was the fact that the trees are themselves now single mesh objects. Translucency is a shadow intensive effect, so the self shading of the translucency rays adds up quickly. I suspect that if I had not consolidated these meshes leaving the leaves separate from the trunks, the resulting render would have completed in half the time. Sometimes, I just can't catch a break!

I've not been anxious to do so, but from what I can tell a true render of the full scene with translucency and even decent light quality would take over a week on my system, which is simply impractical. As many of you know, the entire point of this study was to create Howie Farkes style content for Bryce. But it seems impractical at this stage due to rendering issues. If not for the memory leak bug and the rotational bug with Instancing, I'd not need to employ this ideal of "super-meshes" as a workaround to attain naturalistic levels of complexity.

I am working on a companion product to Night & Day City, let's call it "City Central" for now, it will provide a range of taller feature buildings, inspired by some famous actual buildings plus a dose of my own imagination. This is a quick and dirty render so not what I would call final quality, but it gives you an idea of what I am working on - the existing Night & Day City in the foreground, the new tall buildings set in the background.

OK - transferring Genesis Evolution Muscularity morphs to G2M and G2F with GenX. You need to have, installed, Genesis, the Genesis Muscularity morph set, GenX2, GenX2 AddOn for Genesis 2, either or both G2F and G2M.

Start DS

Open the GenX tab (Windows>Panes (Tabs)>GenX

You'll probably (without docking it) want to resize it wider and much taller than it will open by default.

In the GenX tab, working down from the top of it unless noted:

Make sure you are in the Transfer sub-tab (top left)

Click the Source button, and in the dropdown list that appears select Genesis.

If your computer is like mine, and you have as many morphs in genesis as I do, go and make and have a cup of tea (or dinner) while a little window opens and shows all the morphs being processed. Takes many minutes on my machine.

If it ends showing some errors in that window, just ignore them and click on OK (it's just some early Genesis morphs that have broken ERC formulae - won't affect this.)

In the central section of the GenX tab you'll see a list of bones, regions etc, each of which expand to show individual morphs. Right click anywhere in that portion of the tab, in the right-click menu go to 'Show in List' and across and make sure the first three of the four submenu entries are ticked - if not, tick them: Pose Controllers, Joint Controlled Morphs and Hidden Morphs/Controllers.

Go back up to the top of the GenX tab and in the box beside Find: type flexion. At the right hand end of that box click the button that probably has 'any' written on it, and in the dropdown list pick 'group' instead.

Just below that there are three buttons Previous, First and Next. Press First

In the central area, a morph channel will be highlighted in yellow - one of the Flexion morphs. Click in the little box at the LEFT end of that highlighted line, to the left of the name, so it is ticked.

Go back up and press the Next button. Another one of the morphs in the Flexion group will appear highlighted oin the central section. Click to tick the box to the left of that.

Repeat with the next button and ticking to the left of each highlighted line until all are done (you'll know when because the Next will take you back to the first one you've ticked.)

Now, go back to by the Find: at the top, delete Flexion and type muscularity instead. click on First, tick to the left of the highlighted morph, go to Next, click the new highlighted morph, and repeat until all the Muscularity morphs are ticked as well as all the Flexion ones.

Nearly done - that's the long bit. Now:

Under the morph list, on the left are three settings, each with a long button that produces a dropdown menu beside them. Set them to:

Mode: Selected morphs
Shape: genesis
Target: Genesis 2 Male (or Genesis 2 Female, depending which you want to transfer to),

To the right of those are three smaller buttons. Do NOT click the Select button. The middle one will say either Fast, Edges or Smooth. Either Fast or Edges is fine, and will produce the same results with the other settings below. Don't press the 'transfer' button yet.

There are some further options below that, but they may not be displaying. if they are not, then click in the middle of the bottom of the pane to cause the lower section of advanced choices to show. in that lower section set the following settings, changing the default ones where necessary:

Limits -10 10

Resolution 1 (actually, 10 will just about do. the default 50 will NOT do and will lose much of the morph definition)
Compress generated files (up to you - I leave off)
Tick Transfer controlled transforms
Tick Transfer dial groups
Untick Show hidden dependencies
Transfer CM with dependent morphs
Replace existing files

Now go back up to the Transfer button to the right of the Target selection and click the transfer button.

Done.

If you want to do this for both G2F and G2M, simplest thing at this point is to change the Target from G2M to G2F (or vice versa, depending on which you did first) and click the Transfer button again as the settings are the same.

This has taken me a LOT longer to write than it does to do. Indeed apart from the time it takes my computer to process all the Genesis morphs on starting GenX, it takes far less time to do than it does to READ this.

Yes, they are Central Time

I want to get prime but not sure but not sure if I can get it before midnight central time zone.

Maybe central USA time? Good question.

DanaTA said:

There was an EF2 tornado with winds of 120mph just north of Boston today, in the town of Revere. It was down for four minutes, was about as wide as 6.5 football fields and traveled for two miles. Nobody was killed or hurt, which is surprising, since it did some damage. It went right down Broadway, which is a main road as I understand, maybe the downtown area. There was an EF0 tornado yesterday, also north of here. We supposedly average two tornadoes per year in Massachusetts. They're more common in the western part of the state, though. These were both in the eastern part, and Revere is just north of Boston. I just looked at the Google Earth map of that area, it's Rte. 107, and it is quite densely populated. It's amazing there were no injuries!

Dana

...in late July which is normally the hottest time of the year in that region.

...here it's going to be around 90° if not in the 90s for the rest of the week (and they still haven't fixed the AC at the local cafe).

Thanks Serene, I've been on a new creative kick lately and scifi has always been one of my favorite genres.

Another image: The central elevator moves up and down to allow access to the sublevel, to deliver supplies and whatnot.

Greetings,

JohnDelaquiox said:

I hate to be this guy. I am honestly not impressed with the Genesis 2 male figures. The chest in particular to me still looks like flat breast, too rounded off on the bottom and there is no variation with the abdominal region.

I can only imagine that all these images are with HD most-definitely on, as I can't imagine getting that detail without it.

This is a good look, the arms and chest and lots of the body are dead on to pictures I can find. I don't know how much I need this character, in reality, but I'm deeply impressed with what they've put together.

-- Morgan

This is my first entry in this challenge...
Title: California Oranges

As we leave the Central California San Joaquin Valley on our way home

in the Sierra Nevada mountains, we pass by a beautiful orange farm at

the base of the gentle foothills. Many international tourists on their way

to Sequoia Kings Canyon Parks, pull over to the side of the highway to

photograph this picturesque farm.

This challenge took me into the Instancing Lab where I had never been

before... It was not without the help of the tutorial by Rashad Carter and

another by Kine_magiK... that I came out alive... Many crashes when I

tried to instance so many actual trees... So I rendered an image of one

orange tree and created a 2d picture obj for instancing the trees...

which worked a lot better. The orange tree was actually 2 of the same

Bryce tree (I can't remember what type of tree it was) with one rotated

on the Y axis to make what I thought an orange tree shape should be.

The oranges were just spheres multireplicated and fit within the tree

branches.
Steve

Kyoto Kid said:

...ran into something new. Using the EZ Volume Camera with a spotlight flagged for the volumetric effect. Also using a beam effect from HeroFX in the centre of the spotlight cone. Upon rendering, there is an unusual dark bar artefact/pattern appearing at different points in the volumetric cone of the spotlight. I made sure to set the beam effect to transparent and turned "Cast Shadows" off. the transparency plane and effect are also aligned parallel with the spotlight beam at dead centre.

Also using one Advanced Ambient and one Advanced Distant light as well as two Linear Point Lights (the latter which do not interfere with the Spotlight or beam effect),

Figuring it may have been something about the transparency map used for the HeroFX effects, I then substituted a thin cylinder primitive set to 50% opacity and 100% Ambient for the central beam and turned "Cast Shadows" for the cylinder off. However I still get the banding effect in the spotlight cone..

Without the HeroFX plane or the cylinder primitive, the spotlight cone renders fine with no unwanted artefacts

The odd thing is in another scene I created which used A couple Jepe's SpecialZ lightning effects (which also make use of transparency planes) within a volumetric cone, this didn't occur.

Would you mind posting the render? I'd like to see if it is similar to what Spyro was getting.

...ran into something new. Using the EZ Volume Camera with a spotlight flagged for the volumetric effect. Also using a beam effect from HeroFX in the centre of the spotlight cone. Upon rendering, there is an unusual dark bar artefact/pattern appearing at different points in the volumetric cone of the spotlight. I made sure to set the beam effect to transparent and turned "Cast Shadows" off. the transparency plane and effect are also aligned parallel with the spotlight beam at dead centre.

Also using one Advanced Ambient and one Advanced Distant light as well as two Linear Point Lights (the latter which do not interfere with the Spotlight or beam effect),

Figuring it may have been something about the transparency map used for the HeroFX effects, I then substituted a thin cylinder primitive set to 50% opacity and 100% Ambient for the central beam and turned "Cast Shadows" for the cylinder off. However I still get the banding effect in the spotlight cone..

Without the HeroFX plane or the cylinder primitive, the spotlight cone renders fine with no unwanted artefacts

The odd thing is in another scene I created which used A couple Jepe's SpecialZ lightning effects (which also make use of transparency planes) within a volumetric cone, this didn't occur.

...what, no bacon? ;-)

Actually looks very tasty (mmmm...getting a sugar rush now just looking at it).

Happy Half Century of circling around our central stellar primary.

The Daz3D programs and models are excellent. But the documentation is lousy. Most of it -- what little there is -- is in the form of tutorials. Most of them are for earlier versions of the program. Many of the links are broken. For example the following is supposed to be a deformers tutorial:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/tutorial/tutorial?id=2112&_m=d

It 404s.

In fact most of the "documentation" consists of links to off-site tutorials. Many of those point to http://artzone.daz3d.com, which apparently no longer exists. As far as I can tell almost all the "documentation" that exists has been contributed by the community of users who post solutions once they've been able to figure them out. I applaud the users for doing that. I appreciate it. I'd get nowhere without their help.

Look. I know that Daz Studio is free. And that's wonderful. But I have bought hundreds of dollars worth of models, plugins and other programs from Daz. Studio is the central program that puts it altogether. It should be well documented.

Studio and the others are complex programs. They should have comprehensive reference manuals. Those should use names and labels that match those of the current program. Every listed feature, menu item, check box, etc, should have an explanation -- a real explanation not one that just repeats or rephrases the labels or mouse-over pop-ups. Not only do Daz's users waste an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what a particular check-box does (or dropdown menu item or context menu or ...) but also it is the other users and tech-support people who have to answer the innumerable questions that could have been answered by one sentence in a reference manual. That is a waste of everyone's time and the company's resources.

Just why is there no manual for this program. What the hell were they thinking?

DreamSlayerArtworks
INVASION ~ Countdown To OBLIVION: http://www.dreamslayerartworks.com/vB3/showthread.php?10324-INVASION-Countdown-To-OBLIVION
Deadline will be "Midnight" Central Standard Time at the end of [this] month.

PC Inspiration Contest — July 2, 2014: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/43309/
(platinum club members only)
Closing date: Tuesday, July 8, 2014